I know many old men
and women who are reputed moral, but who are living with partners whom
they have long ceased to love, or who have ugly disagreeable maiden
daughters for whom they have never been able to find husbands--daughters
whom they loathe and by whom they are loathed in secret, or sons whose
folly or extravagance is a perpetual wear and worry to them. Is it moral
for a man to have brought such things upon himself? Someone should do
for morals what that old Pecksniff Bacon has obtained the credit of
having done for science.
But to return to Mr and Mrs Allaby. Mrs Allaby talked about having
married two of her daughters as though it had been the easiest thing in
the world. She talked in this way because she heard other mothers do so,
but in her heart of hearts she did not know how she had done it, nor
indeed, if it had been her doing at all. First there had been a young
man in connection with whom she had tried to practise certain manoeuvres
which she had rehearsed in imagination over and over again, but which she
found impossible to apply in practice. Then there had been weeks of a
_wurra wurra_ of hopes and fears and little stratagems which as often as
not proved injudicious, and then somehow or other in the end, there lay
the young man bound and with an arrow through his heart at her daughter's
feet.
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